HE WILL LIVE FOREVER[i]

L. C. Vinholes

Ottawa, March 14, 1979

During my fourteen years in Japan, I had many opportunities to be well acquainted with the personality and the art of Kitasono Katsue, the man and the poet.

One was just before the exhibition of Brazilian Concrete Poetry at the National Museum of Modern Art, in Kyobashi, Tokyo, on April 1960. When I was preparing the material for the exhibition, after three years of permanent contact especially with the members of the Groups VOU, PAN POÉSIE and ALMÉE, that I knew since 1957, Kitasono promised me his personal support and said: “… we, interested in the avant-garde language of poetry, must work together, helping each other. I am convinced that the Brazilian poets working on concrete poetry are of the same opinion”. As a result, a panel with a personal massage by Kitasono has been shown at the exhibition, next to the panel with the Pilot Plan of the Brazilian Concrete Poetry.

Another opportunity to better know the value of the poetry created by Kitasono was during the period from 1961 to 1964 when I translated into Portuguese his outstanding collection of poems Kemuri no Chokusen = Straight Lines of Smok. I had many occasions to talk with him, to hear from him the history of the process of each poem of the collection and the reasons for many words, very frequent in his own language.

I remember how pleased Kitasono was when, in 1964, during the International Exhibition of Concrete Poetry at the Sogetsu Kaikan, in Tokyo, took place a reading in Japanese and Portuguese of the above-referred collection.

Kitasono was a quiet man but he was a very sincere friend. He seemed afraid to write to others but he was very courageous when writing his poems and his assays. He may have looked shy, but he was very confident as a leader of the group VOU that has the longest history and the most important significance in the world of poetry in Japanese literature of the last decades.

In August 1977, on the very day that I left Japan I was with Kitasono at his office in Fujimicho, near Itabashi Station. We talked about poetry we took some photographs together as we did in our first encounter in 1957. I gave him my new address in Canada and we promised to keep in touch with each other, and, from that day on until June 1978, he had sent me three editions of the magazine VOU. The last edition of a sequence that has 160 issues.

The personal style of Kitasono, his simplified language, his characteristic patterns has a very strong and intelligent reflex in the works of many Japanese poets.

Kitasono Katsue will live forever he created his world, he wrote his poetry and his own history.